Hi.

On Mon, 2010-12-13 at 13:29 +0100, Lists Account wrote:
quoted text
> Hi All,
> 
> Summarising, for future reference...
> 
> I received some six responses. Overall the feedback was a little
> disappointing. Three responses suggested that it would be easier/less
> time consuming/more stable to simply connect a consumer access point
> device via Ethernet. Of course, I wouldn't learn as much by doing this
> :-(. The background to this seems to be mostly issues with the
> configuration and stability of drivers e.g. ath and ral.
> 
> At least a couple of the respondents are successfully using ALIX boards,
> including the desired 2D13. None of the responses related to the
> specific wireless devices that I asked about. Some of those mentioned as
> having been used included the AR5212 and AR5413 (with ath) and the
> RT2561C (ral).
> 
> A couple of responses indicated that OpenBSD doesn't support 802.11n. I
> got my initial information from the athn manual page. It begins:
> > ...
> > NAME
> >     athn - Atheros IEEE 802.11a/g/n wireless network device
> > ...
> >     The athn driver provides support for a wide variety of
> >     Atheros 802.11n devices ...
> 
> Which I incorrectly took to mean that "n" networking was supported...
> 
> However, further down in the same man page, under caveats, it states:
> > ...
> >     The athn driver does not support any of the 802.11n capabilities
> >     offered by the adapters.  Additional work is required in
> >     ieee80211(9) before those features can be supported.
> > ...
> 
> That should teach me (yet again) to read the whole man page :-)
> 
> Cato Auestad provided a very helpful link to a description of his
> working (ral based) OpenBSD configuration:
>     http://bleakgadfly.com/notes/openbsd_wifi.html
> 
> There he mentions that support from the hostap daemon - hostapd(8) - is
> also necessary for such a configuration. Something else that I hadn't
> realised.

Not true. You do not need any use of hostapd daemon (for SINGLE AP). You
need CARD, that CAN WORK in hostap mode.

Btw, I tested three Atheros minipci cards (AR5212/5213) to find out,
that usage of the chip, that should work in hostap mode, is not the
guaranty, that card with that chip will be useable in hostap mode. Two
of them (some TP-Links) caused hard freezes after ifconfig and my
Wistron CM9 simply refused to switch into 802.11g hostap mode - always
ended in 802.11a.

Now I use several Alixes (2D3 and 2D13) + Tonze PC-620C (ralink) minipci
card + 2.5" SSD disk as wireless AP (802.11g)/router/fw/proxy with
openbsd-current. There were problems with AP stability, but not in last
two/three months.

# dmesg | grep ral 
ral0 at pci0 dev 12 function 0 "Ralink RT2561S" rev 0x00: irq 9, address
00:17:b7:30:41:ab
ral0: MAC/BBP RT2561C, RF RT2527
#

merlin

quoted text
> 
> So, based on the feedback, it looks like while this might be a fun
> project, it could be hard to create a stable "production" access point.
> Thanks for all the info.